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Copyright 2011 Front Porch Digital. All rights reserved

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Case Study

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CASE STUDY

Preserving our naonss video content

The Library of Congress (LOC) is using the technology of Front Porch

Digital to preserve the naons rich treasure trove of videotaperecordings so they wont be lost to future generaons.

A mul-year project to migrate analog videotapes to digital lesgot under way in early 2008 at the librarys Naonal Audio-Visual

Conservaon Center in Culpeper, Virginia. The 415,000-square foot

building is a state-of-the-art facility recently refurbished through a

gi of $155 million from the Packard Humanies Instute.

The Library of Congress-Front Porch Digital story had its beginnings

over seven years ago. Its a story of how a daunng technologychallenge was overcome through a leap of faith, go-to-the moon

invenon and development work, and creave soluons in hardware

and soware.

Worlds largest videotape collecon

Imagine a pile of videotape cassees about as tall as the dome on

the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Thats guravely what the LOC

archivists were contemplang as they sat down to decide how to

preserve those videotapes for future generaons.

We have over 600,000 videotapes, one of the largest colleconsin the world, said Greg Lukow, chief of the librarys Moon Picture,

Broadcasng and Recorded Sound Division. The problem of

preservaon was urgent, because the quality of those videotapeswas deteriorang, meaning that a signicant poron was at risk ofbeing lost every year, he said.

Whats more, new videotapes were streaming into the library

every day for just one example, VHS cassees of CNN broadcasts,

24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our collecon was growing by

some 120,000 to 150,000 items each year.

Technology had to be invented

In 2001 Lukow engaged Jim Lindner, an internaonally respected

authority on the preservaon and migraon of electronic media andfounder of the consulng rm Media Maers. Lindner, who nowserves as Senior Vice President of Strategic Development for Front

Porch Digital, was hired as a consultant to collaborate on nding a

soluon.

When we started, we looked at the size of the collecon and

realized that there would be many challenges, said Lindner. Thetechnology to automate the migraon process and achieve the

throughput needed in a mely and cost eecve manner simply

didnt exist. We would have to invent it.

A leap of faith

Unless a creave and invenve soluon could be found, the LOCfaced three alternaves:

Abandon the idea of preserving thetapes, an unacceptable opon giventhe librarys mission of making its

resources available and useful to

Congress and the American people;

Preserve only selected videotapes, an

opon that would require extremelydicult decisions in guessing what

might be important 10, 50 or 100

years from now; or

Place a bet and have faith that creave

minds would come up with a workablesoluon in a reasonable me frame.

I chose the third opon as a challenge, said Lindner. I had faith

that we could do this. In 2001 the technology didnt exist. I hoped

we could bring it into existence in six or seven years.

The building in Culpeper was a huge advantage for the project

Originally built by the Federal Reserve, it was bought by David

Woodley Packard, chairman of the Packard Humanies Instute

in 1998.

It was more than we could have hoped for, said Lindner. Partof it was already there it had been built to hold enough U.S

currency to supply the eastern half of the U.S. in case of nuclea

aack, so it had these amazing underground vault areas that couldbe adapted for storing tape, lm and other archives with carefully

controlled temperature and humidity condions. Then, with the

help of the Packard Foundaon, the library was able to ret it and

build addional space for processing, research, administraonand other funcons.

The library realized that it would take many decades and be

prohibively expensive to migrate and digize the audio-visual

collecon manually. Using Front Porch Digital, they would be

done in a few years and drascally reduce cost.

Jim Lindner, Senior VP Strategic Development

Front Porch Digital


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Four crical problems to solve

The videotape migraon soluon that the project team sought

would have to solve four problems. It would have to:

Eliminate the need for manual video quality monitoring

Encode for several levels of quality simultaneously archive, producon and browsing quality

Migrate a large number of tapes at the same me in

real me

Improve image quality while creang metadata about

the content

We started with industrial robots that were available at the me

but had been designed for other purposes, Lindner said.

They had to be modied substanally to handle videotape

cassees. At the same me we were working on how to generate

data about the tape content, developing methods for cleaning oldtapes, and designing the workow process from one end to the

other. Above all we wanted to make sure we didnt lose anything

that was on the original les. We wanted to create lossless les.

The SAMMArobot is born

It took several years and the hard work of many members of

Lindners and Lukows team, but eventually they came up with

the System for Automated Migraon of Media Assets, or SAMMA,

now known as the SAMMArobot. SAMMA Systems, formed to

manufacture the Robot and other migraon products, was

acquired by Front Porch Digital in 2008.

At full producon four SAMMA Robots will be installed atthe Culpeper facility. The Robot is designed to migrate huge

libraries containing massive numbers of videotape cassees in

either U-Mac or Betacam formats. It can produce large numbers

of simultaneous digital video encodings from seven VTRs. The

recordings are not copied as video but as digital les, with

complete metadata to describe the condion of the content.

The library realized that it would take many decades and be

prohibively expensive to migrate and digize the audio-visual

collecon manually. Using Front Porch Digital, they would be done

in a few years and drascally reduce cost, concludes Lindner.

The SAMMArobotworkow

The digized output from the Front Porch Digital migraon

machines is encoded in many formats which include JPEG2000

MPEG-2, Quickme, Flash, MPEG-1, Windows Media, MXF

amongst others.

The Library has chosen the following formats:

Lossless JPEG2000 for archiving

MPEG-2 for mezzanine or working copies

Windows Media for general purpose sharing

Real Media for low-latency desktop browsing

Heres how the SAMMArobot workow goes:

Before the SAMMArobot is installed, Front Porch Digital Custome

Support invesgates the users data systems. Database support

is included in the SAMMA Robots rst-year maintenance

agreement. If appropriate, Front Porch Digital Customer Suppor

imports the users tape ID or barcode records to the SAMMA

Robots SQL database.

The accessioning procedure

The SAMMArobot can hold up to 48 U-Mac or 60 Betacam

cassees at one me. A tape-prep operator pulls a suitable batch

of tapes from the library and performs an accessioning procedure

that includes these steps:

Visual and olfactory inspection for foreign objects

or damage

Visual conrmaon of tape markings (it s the right tape

in the box)

Notaon of inspecon results in Front Porch Digita

soware, to be included in Front Porch Digitals XML

report later

Prinng and applicaon of Front Porch Digital-readable

barcode label

Aer each tape gets passed through SAMMAclean, the operator

notes each tapes cleaning status (Pass/Fail) in the accessioning

procedure above. Either way, every tapes cleaning status isreported in SAMMArobots XML output.

The SAMMArobot scans the tapes for barcodes. Unreadable

barcodes (usually just misplaced) are reported on the

SAMMArobot workstaon screen so the operator can reset them

When all tape migraons are completed, the SAMMArobot

workstaon screen informs the operator. Progress is always

visible so the operator can predict when to return with the next

batch of tapes.


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A terabyte of digital les per day

Seven VTRs and four plus simultaneous encodings deliver dozens

of streams all day, every day. Thats a fountain of video output

from one part-me operator and about ten square feet of oor

space. If a user chooses lossless JPEG2000 for archiving, 15-50

Mb/s MPEG-2 for a mezzanine or working copy, Windows Media

for general purpose sharing, and Real Media for low-latencydesktop browsing, a SAMMArobot could easily generate a

terabyte or more of digital video les every day.

To empower the Library of Congresss infrastructure to absorb

that much video that fast, a SAMMArobots les and metadata

are organized in a standardized manner, on standard computer

equipment, with standardized video connecons and best

pracces.

Project also expected to employ SAMMA SolosTM

In addion to the four SAMMArobots , the Library of Congress

migraon project is expected to ulize a total of 15 SAMMAsolos,

an appliance designed for smaller jobs,

digizing one videotape at a me. It can

handle videotape in any format, including

one-inch, VHS and others. Each Solo is

designed to be an independent system,

but has scalable control architecture.

Up to 16 SAMMAsolo systems can

be networked and controlled by one

operator using a centralized, easy-to-

manage interface.

Front Porch Digital and the LOC esmate

that in its rst full year of operaon,

the migraon project will produce

approximately 2 petabytes (2,000

terabytes or 2 million gigabytes) of

digital content. This amount of data,

if stored on 700 mb CD-ROMs, would

create a stack of disks more than two

miles high. When addional planned

systems are brought online, the annual

producon rate is expected to go up to

three to ve petabytes.

A test bed for invenon

In addion to Front Porch Digital, other rms are partnering in

the project. Ascent Media has been responsible for the overal

design of audiovisual aspects, and Communicaons Engineering

Inc. (CEI) is serving as systems integrator.

Our facility is actually a test bed for research, developmentand invenon, said Lukow. We are fortunate to be working in

collaboraon and partnership with Front Porch Digital, Ascent

CEI and rms in the manufacturing and creave communies, as

well as other libraries and archives to acquire and preserve these

treasures for the future.

The library holds the worlds largest audiovisual collecon

and we take our stewardship obligaons very seriously, Lukow

concluded. With projects like this one, we are developing the

ability to make our service beer, faster, more useful, and more

ecient, with greater capability and capacity on behalf of the

American people and the American taxpayer.

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